Alice Ollstein

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Alice Ollstein is a reporter at Talking Points Memo, covering national politics. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been reporting in DC ever since, covering the Supreme Court, Congress and national elections for TV, radio, print, and online outlets. Her work has aired on Free Speech Radio News, All Things Considered, Channel News Asia, and Telesur, and her writing has been published by The Atlantic, La Opinión, and The Hill Rag. She was elected in 2016 as an at-large board member of the DC Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Alice grew up in Santa Monica, California and began working for local newspapers in her early teens.

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Alice

On the eve of the first full open enrollment period of the Trump era, several independent studies estimate that enrollment will drop this year as a result of the administration’s actions to gut outreach funding, cancel planned subsidy payments to insurers, and sow confusion with public statements declaring the Affordable Care Act “dead.”

S&P Global Ratings published a report Tuesday projecting that enrollment will drop between 7 and 13 percent compared to last year—meaning between 0.8 and 1.6 million more people will go uninsured in 2018.

Three Republican senators told TPM on Tuesday that they oppose calls from former White House adviser Steve Bannon to defund Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and administration and the Russian government. Because Republicans only have a 52-seat majority in the Senate, those three would be enough to block such a bill from passage if it ever came to the Senate floor.

In a continuation of the 2017 truism that Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act are never truly dead, a gang of House and Senate lawmakers led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) are working to insert a provision into the long-awaited tax reform bill that would gut the ACA’s individual mandate.

When news broke Monday morning that at least three former Trump campaign associates have been criminally charged as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation, President Trump sounded off angrily on Twitter, leaving many nervous that Trump may attempt to fire Mueller or somehow meddle in the investigation going forward.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is currently investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the Trump campaign, released a statement Monday morning calling on the Senate to act swiftly to protect the federal investigations from the President’s interference.

Despite President Trump’s repeated declarations that “Obamacare is finished … dead … gone,” the first full open enrollment period of the Trump era begins on Wednesday, and the administration has taken some surprisingly strong steps to make it a success.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee announced Saturday afternoon that they will subpoena the bank records of the opposition research firm that produced an explosive dossier about President Donald Trump’s interactions with the Russian government leading up to the 2016 election.

“The parties have reached an agreement related to the House Intelligence Committee’s subpoena for Fusion GPS’s bank records that will secure the Committee’s access to the records necessary for its investigation,” a committee spokesperson said in a statement to reporters.

The morning after news broke that special counsel Robert Mueller had filed his first criminal charges in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the Trump campaign, the White House Press Secretary took to social media to lob accusations at the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The editors of the conservative news site Washington Free Beacon disclosed Friday night that they were the entity that first contracted the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump during the 2016 GOP primary—work that later led to the production of a controversial dossier on Trump’s ties with Russia.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, backed by a federal grand jury, has filed the first charges in his investigation into the Trump campaign and administration’s dealings with Russia, according to a report Friday night by CNN later confirmed by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. At least one individual could be taken into custody as early as Monday. Both the names of the person or person and the charges filed against them remain for now under a judge’s seal.

A new report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services shines a light on the Trump administration’s decision to cut outreach during the final days of the last open enrollment period in January.